My personal stuff and my interest in Business Processes Management, Collaboration Methodologies and Technologies, Data Security and User Experience.
Technologies that I currently focus on are Dojo, iPhora Foundation/Touch, Linux, NOSQL, and NodeJS.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Thank you to all the potential speakers for submitting their abstract to MWLUG 2013. We have close to 70 submissions this year. The MWLUG 2013 speaker committee will be review all the submissions and will announce our list of MWLUG 2013 speakers in a couple of weeks.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Reminder to everyone who is thinking about submitting an abstract to MWLUG 2013, abstract submission will be closing this Friday, June 14, 2013 at 6:00 PM CST. If you are new to the speaking at a conference, remember that our goal each year is to have up to 25% of the sessions be presented by new speakers. Don't be shy, show us what you know. MWLUG is all about the exchange of knowledge. A number of first time speakers at MWLUG have now spoken at Lotusphere sorry IBM Connect. So here is your opportunity to present in front of your IBM community colleagues. So get your submissions in by the end of this week!!!

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

A few years ago at Lotusphere, I picked up a number of Lotus Software hats. Just like the Lotus brand which is fading away into the sunset, all my Lotus Software hats have been lost or have been damaged. My favor was the Lotus Domino 8 cap which was lost on a trip a few years ago. Now I am down to my final Lotus Software hat. I have decided to not wear it since it is the last of its kind and I will preserve it for the archive. But as the Lotus brand is now extincted, so will everything associated with it. Maybe in 30 years, I can go to the Antiques Roadshow and ask how much it is worth. Maybe I can then finally retire from the proceeds of the sale.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Do you think you have created a great home brew or wine!!! Do you think your local micro-brewery beer is out of this world!!! Then bring them with you to MWLUG 2013 and lets find out.

We are happy to announce the MWLUG 2013 Charity Brewfest Competition. It will be held on Wednesday August 21, 2013 before the MWLUG Wednesday Exhibitor Showcase Reception. This competition is open for all attendees. We would like to thank our sponsor CDW for making this event possible.

Gregg Eldred and his panel of experienced judges will taste the different entries and select the winners of this competition. Gregg has selected some interesting prizes for this competition.

In order to participate in this competition, the submission fee is $10 with all proceeds benefiting the MWLUG Oklahoma Tornado Relief Fund. You can submit as many entries as you would like. For each entry, please bring at least two 12 ounce bottles. All competitors will need to sign a waiver. All nationally distributed micro-brewery beer do not qualify.

For every dollar that we raise in this event, our sponsor Phora Group will match a dollar. We are working with other sponsors for additional matching funds that will all benefit the Oklahoma residences that have been devastated by the recent horrific tornadoes.For information go to:http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2013.nsf/WednesdayAgenda.xsp

Note: With a customer deadline coming up and with all the work that MWLUG 2013 requires, I haven't had the time to devote to writing this series. So I took most of today to complete this part. As I was writing this part of the series, I realized that I should talk about creating widgets using Dojo in general. So I split this part into part A and B because it was getting way too long.Welcome to part three of my five part series "Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets". In the first two parts, we talked about how Bootstrap widgets can be assembled using a consistent framework of standard HTML elements with CSS3 styling. In part three, we will connect together our combo box widget using Dojo and make it functional.

As XPages developer you should be familiar with Dojo as the underlining Javascript library. XPages widgets are mostly Dojo widgets, Dijits. To create a dojo widget we should be familiar with dojo.declare and dijit._Widget ( dijit._widgetBase for 1.7 or higher). If you are familiar with these two features of Dojo, then you should wait for Part IIIB which I will publish next week. dojo.declareSince JavaScript does not support a Class system Dojo simulates an object oriented class structure using dojo.declare which we will use to create our Bootstrap combo box widget. In my opinion, this is one major reason to use Dojo which goes beyond the standard JavaScript Prototype. With dojo.declare you can creating superclasses that other classes can inherit and use. Remember that I mentioned that Bootstrap widgets are like the RISC of widgets. With dojo.declare you can look at a Bootstrap widget as a collection of simpler widgets each with it only superclass. Therefore in reflecting with the RISC approach, we want to create a number of reusable core superclasses that we can use to create our combo box widget. For more information about using dojo.declare go to: http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.6/dojo/declare.html.dijit._WidgetThe other important class of Dojo that we need to understand in creating our Bootstrap widget is dijit._Widget. It handles the widget lifecycle from creation, startup to destruction. In addition, it handles the registration of the widget and make it available to be reference in our code. So if our widget has the id of "myWidget", we can reference it after it has been instantiated using dijit.byId('myWidget'). I attempted to create my own widget registration classes so that I would not need to include all the overhead of dijit._Widget, but that experiment turned into a complex mess and I went back to dijit._Widget. Maybe in the future I will try again. I just do not like loading extra stuff if I do not need it. A widget lifecycle includes:

Creation and Start Up:

constructor()

postscript()

create()

postMixinProperties()

buildRendering()

postCreate()

startup()

Destruction:

destroy();

destroyDescendants();

destroyRecursive();

destroyRendering();

uninitialize();

When creating your own Bootstrap widgets, the most important dijit methods are constructor, postCreate and startup. Majority of the time when I create my own widgets, I just use postCreate.

Note: I changed the DOM node as described in part II. I changed the class "span3" of the input to "input-medium' and remove the class "span3" from the ul tag which provide the same alignment with less code.

One important part of the widget life cycle is to define the HTML DOM of the widget. This is done in the life cycle "buildRendering." You can define our Bootstrap widget skeleton DOM HTML in the widget js file, in a HTML template, or directly as part of page HTML DOM. Dojo provides a helper class , dijit._Templated, that allows you to define a key variable "templateString" as the DOM representative of the widget. You can defined it directly

By using the dijit._Templated, dijit._Widget will automatically use the templateString in the buildRendering() cycle for the widget.

If you are using a HTML template to define the templateString, you will also need to use dojo.provide to tell Dojo where the HTML template and js file are located. In addition to using a templateString to define the structure of our widget you can also define the widget DOM directly in the buildRendering() method or just have the complete widget DOM reference in the HTML page itself and get a handle the widget DOM node.

Creating the Bootstrap Combo Box Widget ClassesThat all said, I like having the complete widget DOM skeleton as part of the HTML DOM so when the page loads there is no additional overhead of loading the dijit._Templated superclass. Our iPhora Application Designer engine automatically places the complete Bootstrap widget DOM skeleton into the HTML DOM of the page.Also in our case, we do not declaratively create the widget, so there is no need to perform a buildRendering.

Since we will be using dijit._Widget to build our widget, we need to use dojo.require('dijit._Widget') to load the superclass when we load the page. In creating our combo box, Dojo will need to:

Get a data source that will define the dropdown list

Build the list nodes inside our UL dropdown node from a data source

Connect the different sub nodes to different events that can happen

Define setters and getters to our widget so that we can interact with the widget

There are several events that we expect to happen in a combo box:

Click on dropdown button to open or close the dropdown menu

Click somewhere else in the body to close the dropdown menu when the dropdown menu is opened.

Click on the dropdown menu to select the value and close the dropdown menu

Click on the input field to open and close the dropdown menu.

In order to have the widget understand the different events, you will need to define in your widget skeleton the events for different parts of widget DOM using dojoAttachEvent. When you are creating your widget class using dojo.declare, you need to define each event handle as a private method, for example _onSelectDropDown within your widget class.

Adding dojoAttachEvent in the widget DOM for events is consider best practice, but Richard never follows what is considered the normal anyway. I prefer to use dojo.connect or in the case of dojo.declare, this.connect. Why, since we are programmatically creating the widgets (because it is slightly faster) rather than declaratively, we are not using dojo.parse . For a good discussion about best practices in creating custom Dijits go to this series:http://dojotipsntricks.com/2011/04/23/custom-dijit-best-practises-part-1/http://dojotipsntricks.com/2011/04/23/custom-dijit-best-practises-part-2/Our combo box widget can be split up into three core widgets that can be reused. Therefore, we will first create a three superclasses using dojo.declare that we can reuse with other widgets in the future along with our combo box widget class:

Input Class called 'demoInput'

List Class called 'demoList'

Dropdown Class called 'demoDropDown'

Next time, we will go through the creation of each the classes and add them as superclasses to our combo box class to complete our widget class and demo it using our newly created classes.

Monday, June 3, 2013

I am happy to announce that the MWLUG 2013 IBM OGS Speaker is Scott Souder, Program Director, Messaging and Collaboration Solutions, IBM. It is great to have Scott speak at MWLUG 2013 given his busy schedule. We look forward to hearing Scott speak on the future direction of IBM Messaging and Collaboration solutions.

Scott Souder is Program Director, Messaging and Collaboration Solutions, IBM. Scott is responsible for the product and market strategy for IBM's messaging and collaboration products, including IBM Notes and Domino, iNotes and IBM Connections Mail. Scott's focus is on extending and growing the success of these solutions through customer engagement, partner ecosystem development, and harnessing the breadth and depth of the IBM organization. In his spare time, Scott enjoys being with family, flying airplanes, playing bluegrass music, and the amazing outdoors.

Always be Happy

About Me

I have been working with Notes and Domino since Notes 3. I have started three different companies after working as a consultant in a large firm including Phora Group, Taishan Works and ReCor. I promote the use of collaboration and business processing technologies.
I am the Past President of the GRANITE Lotus User Group here in Chicago and co-organizer of the Midwest Lotus User Group Conferences.
I focus on Business Process Management, UI Design, and Data Security. IBM Champion 2015, 2016, 2017